Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 2012

Imagine you have woken from a dream, a dream brimming with meaning, with passion, with mystery. You try to sustain the feeling, recount the details, share the experience. You fail. Your powers of reconstruction too meager, your tongue too clumsy. Mathematics is such a dream, dreamed by individuals, personal, yet remarkably in a waking state, and provoking sufficient commonality in its recounting to bring individuals together, to create a community of shared passion. The first dreamer of the dream, shrouded in history and myth, perhaps was Thales of Miletus, who later advised Pythagoras of Samos who subsequently founded an order of adherents holding knowledge and property in common while pursuing philosophical and mathematical studies as a moral basis for the conduct of life

The Mathematics Educator, 2015

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 2015

Mark used to love playing computer games that helped him build his mathematical skills as a kid. Gizem spent years hooked on Tetris and credits all the (still somewhat limited) spatial reasoning skills she has to the game. However, mathematical video games that go beyond simple drills are few and far between. In the first article of this summer issue, Laura Broley, Chantal Buteau, and Eric Muller introduce us to E-Brock Bugs, an epistemic computer game designed for teaching mathematics that goes beyond practicing basic skills and aims to develop the more elusive mathematical intuition.

The authors praise Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008) for focusing on the mathematics within mathematics education. They critique the Panel for (a) constraining its analysis to two traditional school courses, (b) isolating independent factors and undervaluing integrated approaches, and (c) overlooking recent insights on mathematics learn- ing. The authors urge others to seek deeper analysis of “mathematics worth knowing,” to integrate multiple resources into instructional approaches, and to delve more deeply into recent learning research

Nature, 2011

introduces seven little-known tales illustrating that theoretical work may lead to practical applications, but it can't be forced and it can take centuries.

2011

One night I was sitting at my desk preparing the next day's lecture of a Functions and Algebra course for pre-service maths teachers. We were dealing with the quadratic function at the time and in the next session I was planning to focus on the different forms of the quadratic equation [i.e. the general form y = ax 2 + bx + c; the turning point form: y = a (xp) 2 + q; and the "root form": y = a (x -α) ( x -β)

Proceedings of the Thirty-first Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, edited by S. L. Swars, D. W. Stinson, & S. Lemons-Smith. (pp. 1576-1583). Atlanta: Georgia State University, 2009., 2009

The following is the abstract (as submitted). It was a description of the proposed session and a call for participants. The idea of “mathematical habits of mind” has been introduced to emphasize the need to help students think about mathematics “the way mathematicians do.” There seems to be considerable interest among mathematics educators and mathematicians in helping students develop mathematical habits of mind. The objectives of this working group are: (a) to discuss various views and aspects of mathematical habits of mind, (b) to explore avenues for research, (c) to encourage research collaborations, and (d) to interest doctoral students in this topic. To facilitate the discussion during the working group meetings, we provide an overview of mathematical habits of mind, including concepts that are closely related to habits of mind—ways of thinking, mathematical practices, knowing-to act in the moment, cognitive disposition, and behavioral schemas. We invite mathematics educators who are interested in habits of mind, and especially those who have conducted research related to habits of mind, to share their work during the first working group meeting. If you would like to give a 10-minute presentation, please contact Kien Lim or Annie Selden in advance.

2013

Our national life will benefit immeasurably from a fresh approach to mathematical education. This is true not just economically and socially. For mathematics, properly approached, is a tonic for the brain and a gymnasium for the mind, and possesses an unrivalled capacity for teaching us how to Think.